Childhood

This article explores how Greek Cypriot elementary school children construct their identities in relation to Sri Lankan and Filipino women who come to Cyprus as domestic workers. The article focuses primarily on the views of children whose families employ these women; however, the views of children whose families do not employ domestic workers are also explored to illustrate how these women are popularly constructed in children's imaginations and in the absence of direct daily interaction with them. The study reveals that children access different cultural discourses and construct identities that are often ambivalent and contradictory and are revealing of new forms of nationalism and racism. For the children whose families employ domestic workers, the home becomes an arena for renegotiating their status as children in their interactions with these women. Thus, the encounter between Self and Other becomes critical to understanding reconstituted definitions of childhood and adulthood.

This article explores the role of children in household livelihoods among the Gedeo ethnic community in Ethiopia. Three themes are discussed — reproductive activities, entrepreneurial work in marketplaces and sociospatial mobility — in the context of recent theoretical debates over children's agency and social competence. With shifts in rural livelihoods, children have developed new agentic and entrepreneurial skills in domestic work, trade and migration. This agency is negotiated in everyday life, but it is also structurally highly circumscribed. Situating children's work within post-rural economic development offers insight into the ways in which regional and global political economy shape their local livelihoods.

Organized children's activities qualify as children's work, in much the same way that school work does. Both produce transferable use value and create capital that contributes to the future production of goods and services. To illustrate this argument, this article draws on qualitative research primarily based on interviews with the parents of participants in two activities: child beauty pageants and academic enrichment classes. Despite considerable differences in the backgrounds of children who participate in these two types of activities, their parents converge in the reasons they give for enrolling their young children in these activities, and in their focus on their children's future careers and achievements.

This article, based on an ethnographic study, examines the role of food in the social interaction of 11- to 17-year-old youths in sports centres in Denmark. The sports centres serve as a free space where young people receive no adult supervision. This is underlined by their understanding and use of food in this environment. Food serves as a medium that introduces occasions for getting together. The article analyses the social significance and symbolic meaning of food in children's and adolescents' peer culture. As everywhere in social life, rules of food choice and eating signal the meaning of social relations and social contexts.

This research incorporated an ecological approach to examine American and Northern Irish children's understanding of the 2003 war in Iraq and the sources of information from which they acquired that understanding. Responses to interviews indicated that the children from the two countries had some common conceptions of and sources of information about the war. However, American and Northern Irish children also differed on several items, suggesting that the macrosystem (e.g. sociopolitical context) plays an important role in children's conceptions of the war. Additionally, the exosystem (media) also played an integral role, as did the microsystem (parents), although to a lesser extent.

Qualitative research from Wales sought to explore aspects of children's views on government and participation. The research project was conducted in 2001 with 105 children aged 8—11 from a diverse sample of schools across Wales. The article first reports the children's perspectives on different levels (and places) of government: the UK parliament and the Welsh Assembly. Second, there is discussion of how the children see government as affecting their lives. The third section of the article presents the children's views on the extent to which they should have a say in local and national political decisions, the examples being the building of a new road in their community and going to war. The children, while declaring a lack of interest in politics in general, in fact engaged enthusiastically in discussion of specific issues that they saw affecting their lives. There was a general expectation that they should be consulted on issues that affect them directly and they saw the potential for their views to be fed into decision-making via intermediaries. Very few, however, expected their own views to be decisive, but rather most believed that their views ought to be considered alongside others.

This article explores a paradox that was identified during an ethnographic study of two Danish therapeutic residential institutions for children with emotional and behavioural problems. The key objective of these institutions is to provide specialized treatment for the individual child. However, the task of organizing everyday life for a group of troubled children is so demanding that little room is left for individualization. In practice, treatment takes the shape of a rather standardized package. Analysing individual treatment as a powerful kind of `institutional thinking', the authors delve into the meaning of an apparent contradiction in terms: standardized individual therapy.